A grand jury in the American city of Detroit has formally charged a Nigerian man in connection with an alleged attempt to blow up an American airliner on Christmas Day. Senior American officials say the man Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab told investigators that he was trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda operatives that had given him the bomb and instructions how to detonate it. Abdulmuttalab has been indicted on six counts including the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and the attempted murder of two hundred seventy eight other passengers and eleven crew aboard the plane. North West flight 253 had taken off from Amsterdam when twenty minutes before landing at Detroit airport on December 25 when it is alleged a young Nigerian tried to detonate a bomb he had concealed in his underwear.